Sunday, September 08, 2013

何東京なし？

If you want to offend a whole nation you may as well do it in style, too frequently it seems television journalists are prepared to follow the script rather than think for themselves, no doubt partly caused by having a director chirping away in their earpiece.

Sky Sports News is generally good, in fact it is very good but when it goes wrong it does make an arse of itself. In a feature on the 2020 Summer Olympic host city selection process it listed by continent the hosts of the summer Olympics except it had made one big boo-boo.

"Australia has hosted the event twice, Melbourne 1956 and Sydney in 2000. Asia has also hosted it twice (notice the ad-libbing of the word 'also') Seoul in 1988 and China in 2008"

What no Tokyo? (that's the title of this piece - I would have liked to have said 'Odinesque Olympic Omission' but in life things whose title feature more than one 'o' are either written by Span or sung by Girls Aloud.

Anyway Tokyo won and Sky behaved like a colleague of mine who claims to have never made an error but when she does she spends all day justifying how she made the error in the first place.We suddenly had facts about 1964 that were conspicuous by their absent just a few hours earlier. Tokyo 2020 may well be about discovering tomorrow but for Sky it was all about discovering 1964.

So congratulations to Tokyo and also to the UK's Adrian Pengilly who questioned the Madrid representatives on the Operacion Puerto scandal.

Instead of having to address questions enquiring about Madrid's infrastructure or investment, the questions centred on what the country was doing to clean up its tarnished image in the light of the four-month long court case earlier this year and the blood bags seized from the disgraced doctor Eufemiano Fuentes which were ordered to be destroyed rather than released and those involved in the doping ring named.

"Those damned blood bags," said the editor of Madrid sports daily AS Alfredo Relano in his column on Sunday. "The questions from the Canadian Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the young Englishman Adam Pengilly, sunk Madrid's bid and rubbed salt into our already seething wounds."

Since the court case Spain has changed its doping laws but they were at the centre of the storm earlier this year and the bid was doomed, new rumours about some players at Spain's two biggest football clubs also refuse to go away and it will be a long time before Spain recovers the trust of the outside world on the topic.